Shop Talk: Albany Scanner
Bringing professional news back to Albany’s 15-minute city
Albany has been living in a news desert for a long time. The Journal, a local paper that once served Albany, Kensington, and El Cerrito, lost its local focus in 2016 when it was absorbed into the East Bay Times. Albany Patch, which gave Albany its first taste of digital local journalism, largely went dark as a local source when AOL restructured the network and removed dedicated local editors. Since then, residents have pieced together local information from regional outlets, neighborhood Facebook groups, and word of mouth on Solano Avenue.
The gap is felt in ways both big and small. In 2016, Ken McCroskey co-chaired an Albany ballot measure to collect taxes to improve sidewalks. Getting the word out meant doorstep flyers and a booth at the Solano Stroll. There was no news coverage until after it passed, and none of it was local. “I found myself explaining the very basic processes of city government instead of talking about the issues at hand,” he said. “There was no central local information exchange that people interact with on a daily or weekly basis.”
A new effort aims to change that. Albany Scanner, a community-funded local news site, is preparing to launch in 2026 with a mission to cover Albany: city council, schools, elections, development, public safety, and as much more as their reporting capacity allows. And the team behind it is about as Albany as it gets.
The Journalist
Emilie Raguso’s history with Albany goes back further than most people realize. She launched and ran Albany Patch in the early days of hyperlocal digital journalism, building relationships across the community before Patch’s corporate owners changed course and pushed her toward Berkeley. She refused, left, and spent the next decade at Berkeleyside, where she became one of the most respected local journalists in the Bay Area.
In 2022, she struck out on her own, founding The Berkeley Scanner to fill a gap in public safety coverage that Berkeleyside had decided to step back from. Four years later, The Berkeley Scanner has published more than 1,200 stories, won national and statewide journalism awards, and become essential daily reading for Berkeley residents.
Albany, meanwhile, kept coming up. Community members reached out to Berkeleyside repeatedly, asking for an Albany section or more Albany coverage. “It just really wasn’t part of their vision for growth,” Raguso said. “So the need went unanswered.”
Around 2024, a group of Albany residents began meeting to think about how to bring news back to the city. Raguso got involved early in an advisory role, cautious about overextending herself while running The Berkeley Scanner essentially solo. But the pull kept growing. “The more I thought about it, the more I just really felt passionate about being more a part of actually getting the site up and running,” she said. “I can’t do the journalism here, but I can do the business side. I can be the publisher. I’ve built this before.”
The Community Behind It
That group of Albany residents became the Albany News Project, a volunteer advisory organization that now has ten members and serves as the community backbone of Albany Scanner. The roster reflects Albany’s unusual depth of civic talent: a retired San Francisco Chronicle reporter, a former mayor, an Albany historian and author, a former Reuters and MarketWatch editor, a longtime Berkeleyside freelancer, a longtime civic organizer, and others with backgrounds in web development, science, and nonprofit communications.
For each of them, the motivation was personal. Michael Cabanatuan, who spent decades covering transportation and general news at the San Francisco Chronicle, traces the need back to two losses: Albany Patch and The Journal. “The advent and demise of Albany Patch followed by the end of The Journal made me realize how badly Albany needed and missed local news coverage,” he said (both outlets still exist in name, but without dedicated local staffing or Albany-focused coverage). The Albany News Project reached out to him within weeks of his retirement from the Chronicle.
Peter Goodman, owner of Albany-based Stone Bridge Press, connects the absence of local news to something larger. “I felt that Trump’s election in 2016 had put us all in danger,” he said. “I ascribed some of his success to his ability to manipulate voters with lies and false statements because those same voters lacked proper news outlets to discover what’s real and what isn’t.” He had watched Berkeleyside become a model for what local news could be and pushed to see if they’d expand into Albany. They weren’t interested. “So what choice did we have?”
Ken McCroskey, a 25-year Albany resident, had been watching the tide go out on local news since long before he moved here. Growing up in Lamorinda in the late 1970s and 80s, he watched local newspapers dry up. Coming to Albany in 1999, he saw the same pattern repeat.
The group’s diversity, they say, is simply Albany being Albany. “It’s a small city in the midst of a major metropolitan area, within miles of one of the world’s great public universities,” Cabanatuan said. “But one thing many of us have in common is a desire to help our community.” Goodman puts it more simply: “We are big enough (20,000 people) to have a range of qualified people, and small enough to not get too diffused.”
How It Works
Albany Scanner and the Albany News Project are intentionally kept separate. Raguso will serve as publisher and editor, managing freelance reporters and eventually a dedicated full-time staffer, with full editorial independence. The Albany News Project handles fundraising and community outreach, with policy input and only broad direction over the scope of coverage.
“We’re building a wall between organizers and coverage,” McCroskey said. “Readers and donors should feel confident that articles aren’t colored by the many and varied views of the ANP Advisory Board.” Goodman is emphatic on the point: “We want to be absolutely clear that there is no quid pro quo offering revenue for coverage. Every journalist on ANP has emphasized that repeatedly.”
The funding model draws directly from what Raguso built at The Berkeley Scanner: monthly memberships from readers, supplemented by a tax-deductible major gifts arm for donors giving $1,000 or more. At The Berkeley Scanner, that combination helped raise around $90,000 in a single year-end campaign. Albany Scanner is building the same dual structure from day one, which Raguso sees as essential given Albany’s smaller audience. “If we want to hire a reporter and pay them market rate, we need to make sure the finances can actually support that,” she said.
The immediate goal is raising $50,000 by April 30 to begin paying professional freelancers and start publishing stories. McCroskey is straightforward about the stakes: “If our fundraising effort falls flat we will do our best to refund the money, less transaction costs. If we get close to our goal, we might offer fewer articles than planned. If we exceed our goal, we hope to offer more.” Goodman, characteristically, is less worried. Asked what happens if the goal isn’t reached, he offered a one-line answer: “A Trump third term? I have every confidence we will make that goal.”
Why It Matters
One thing Raguso wants to be clear about: Albany Scanner won’t be a public safety site like The Berkeley Scanner. “In Berkeley, there was a specific hole in the market where public safety coverage was going uncovered,” she said. “Albany Scanner will be general interest: everything going on in the city.”
That means city council coverage, school board meetings, ballot information, transportation projects, development updates, and the kind of institutional accountability that simply doesn’t exist right now. “When people have more information, they feel even more empowered to be part of the community and affect the policies around them,” Raguso said. “Albany is small, but there is still a bureaucracy, and it can still be challenging to find out what is happening.”
Residents, the ANP members say, often don’t appreciate how much it actually costs to produce that kind of journalism. “Information appears to be free and easily accessible, so it’s easy for people to take it for granted or assume it just sprouts there like weeds on a parking strip,” Goodman said. Cabanatuan is equally direct: “It takes more than good intentions and a handful of volunteers. It takes both money and a commitment to cover the news accurately and consistently, not just when it’s convenient or comfortable.”
Success, for Raguso, looks like one thing above all: a full-time reporter who Albany residents come to know and trust. “We want someone who really knows and understands Albany,” she said. “And our job is to make the site must-read: people are bookmarking it, visiting every day, asking ‘did you see what was on Albany Scanner today?’”
She’s optimistic. Albany, after all, is the kind of place that shows up for things it cares about. Raguso knows this better than most: she built relationships here during her Albany Patch days, watched the community feel the loss when it disappeared, and is now back to help fill the gap a second time.
“You really can’t walk down the street without running into multiple people you know,” she said. “That tight, close connection where people are really in it together is what makes Albany so special.”
For a news site that depends entirely on the community to survive, that might be its greatest asset.
Albany Scanner is currently raising funds to launch in 2026. To become a member or make a major gift, visit albanyscanner.com. To learn more about the Albany News Project, visit albanynewsproject.com.
Hurrah for progress being made. I don't live in Albany now, but lived there when I was a kid a long, long time ago.